Sex text teacher jailed for 12 months

A primary school teacher who sent sexually explicit text messages to a
14-year-old boy she befriended through an online game has been jailed for 12
months.

Teacher Lynn Walls Photo: PA

By Paul Stokes

4:08PM GMT 13 Feb 2009

Lynn Walls, 42, obtained the juvenile's number through the interactive World of Warcraft site before she began to rely on him emotionally and falsely claimed to him that she had breast cancer.

Newcastle Crown Court heard her behaviour had caused lasting damage to the schoolboy became withdrawn, guilty, abusive and had suicidal thoughts.

Walls, who is plump, invented a "thin, attractive and blonde" character to chat online with teenager from London who told her his age.

Penny Moreland, prosecuting, said Walls sent texts which were "crude and explicit in the extreme", inviting the boy to commit sexual acts and have sex with her.

In others, Walls confided childhood and other problems and confessed she loved him. Walls, from Penshaw, Sunderland, who had a son herself, was a primary school teacher in County Durham at the time and of previous good character.

Nick Peacock, defending, said she had been married for 20 years until she discovered her husband was having an affair.

She became a recluse and spent hours playing World of Warcraft, described in court as highly addictive, in which players create virtual characters.

He said she designed someone who was thin, attractive and blonde and had told police: "That character was everything I was not."

The case had "destroyed her days and haunted her nights" and she accepted she was virtually unemployable.

Jailing her, Judge Richard Lowden also banned her from working with children for life, and put her on the Sex Offenders' Register for 10 years.

He told Walls: "It is not just the grossly inappropriate sexual conduct of the message that has done the damage, but to my mind, more damaging was the emotional burden that you put upon that boy, so that in the end he felt responsible for you."